


How To Be A Real Person

by likethenight



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, New Beginnings, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Unintentional Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 06:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9165967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: Receiving her punishment for disabling the shields on Starkiller Base, Captain Phasma comes to the sudden realisation that the First Order is actually pretty ridiculous, if not totally, ludicrously hilarious. Armed with her new-found sense of humour, she defects to find the Resistance, gradually learns how to be a real person with the freedom to make her own decisions, and begins to gain a practical understanding of a few philosophical concepts, like 'friendship' and 'happiness', that she previously only knew about in theory. Not to mention learning how to blag her way halfway across the galaxy, the rudiments of spacecraft mechanics, and how to prove herself when the chips are down. It's certainly a lot more interesting being free.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this not long after seeing Force Awakens...and then sort of forgot about it. It started out as a character study of Phasma, but soon evolved into a 20k+ epic monster of self-discovery and accidental sort-of redemption. I still don't quite know what happened there.
> 
> Big thanks to wauryd for the beta!

Captain Phasma has always prided herself on being the absolute best, the pinnacle of what a stormtrooper can be. From the very beginning of her training she has been the best in her troop, the sharpest shooter, the fiercest fighter, the tallest, straightest soldier on parade, the most steadfast in her loyalty to the First Order and the Supreme Leader. She took the indoctrination as truth from the earliest moments, drank in every word her instructors spoke, read all the datafiles and infocards on the seemingly endless required reading list, never skipped a single sentence, a single word. She never thought to question even the smallest part of it. For Phasma the only truth was the word of Supreme Leader Snoke; her contemporaries might whisper among themselves sometimes, might be caught and sent for reconditioning, but not Phasma, never Phasma. She rose directly through the ranks at an unprecedented speed, shook off her designated number and earned her name, a feat only a few have ever achieved. 

FN-2187’s defection did not shake her resolve, did not make her question a single thing; it was not through any failure on Phasma’s part that he threw away his training and upbringing. His treachery, so unforeseen, was disappointing, certainly; he had shown such promise, his skills better than the rest in his troop, hindered only by his concern for his comrades. His failure to shoot during the operation on Jakku was regrettable, certainly, but a swift reconditioning should have scrubbed out any hint of compassion. Instead he threw away everything he had been taught, everything the First Order had given him, to break out of the Finalizer and liberate Kylo Ren’s prisoner. Phasma didn’t give a fig for Ren’s temper tantrums or his obsessions, but she could acknowledge that if the Resistance were trying to find the Jedi who had forsaken them, it was probably in the First Order’s interest to find him first and neutralise him. Whether or not he still had his powers, he was a valuable figurehead and the tales told about him had more or less reached the status of legends; Phasma had studied them along with the histories of the Rebellion, the fall of the glorious Empire and the rise of the despicable New Republic, and she knew the value of an icon to a movement. Besides, Ren was acting under the guidance of the Supreme Leader, and Phasma would not question the Leader’s decisions, no matter how contemptible she may have found his student. The Supreme Leader had his reasons, she was sure. He moved in mysterious ways, and it was not for her to seek to understand. Presumably he saw something in Ren that Phasma did not. 

Phasma thinks that Kylo Ren is a spoiled child, little more than a boy who has never learned to control his temper. They are of an age, more or less, but Phasma quietly prides herself on being by far the more mature of the two. She knows of Ren’s origins, of course, his legendary parentage and his seduction to the Dark Side by the Supreme Leader, his massacre of his uncle’s students and his adoption into the Knights of Ren. Phasma has no time for the Knights; no better than the Jedi, she thinks, yet another secret order with its own set of mumbo-jumbo rules. She has no Force sensitivity at all, and she prides herself on that, too. Phasma deals in reality, not in magic poorly dressed up as a religion.

Meeting FN-2187 again, Phasma’s frustration and annoyance at being captured was tempered by amusement at how her former trooper’s personality had come out from behind the conditioning he had undergone since childhood. So sure of himself, so ridiculously arrogant, unable to keep himself from informing her over and over again how he was in charge now; how ridiculous humans were, she thought, without training and structure to channel their natural instinct for chatter and chaos. Meeting Ren’s legendary father and his Wookiee friend hardly impressed her either; rebel general or ramshackle outlaw pirate smuggler, Solo was just an old man with his glory days behind him, such as they were. They might have captured Phasma this time, but it was not a triumph she would be allowing them to repeat. So she went along with their ridiculous demands, disabling the shields with the full assurance that her troopers would find them and deal with them before they had a chance to carry out whatever fool’s errand had sent them here. 

They threatened to throw her in the trash compactor, but in the end they were in too much of a hurry to bother to waste time finding it; instead they jammed the signal for the lock on the door and left her trapped inside. She spent a short while watching the screens and following their progress, listening all the while to the commlinks from the various other troop commanders all over the base. Everyone seemed to be on high alert all of a sudden; apparently Kylo Ren’s valuable young prisoner had escaped, and Phasma couldn’t help but roll her eyes, imagining the tantrum he was probably having at this very moment. Clearly everything was going to rack and ruin without her to take things in hand. Phasma was damned if she was going to call for help and draw unwelcome attention to herself; that would be coming anyway, when the First Order’s leaders wanted to know who had turned off the shields. So she set herself to smashing the door down, and then went to round up her troops and rally them to root out the resistance intruders. 

Phasma did come to answer for her crime, of course, but not that day. She barely escaped the base before its destruction, herding as many of her troopers as she could aboard the last transport to leave. Hailed as a hero, she nevertheless stepped forward from the ranks of escapees when Hux demanded to know who had switched off the shields, and reported what had happened in a voice clear enough to reach every last one of those present. The annoyance on Hux’s face gave her a sharp pang of amusement, even as she watched him try to work out how to punish her, for here was the First Order’s most respected stormtrooper, most trusted leader, freely admitting to having been taken prisoner by a Wookiee, an elderly pirate, and the traitor from her own troop. Phasma couldn’t help but see the funny side, even as Hux fulminated at her and summarily sentenced her to six months in the brig with intensive reconditioning. She kept her head high and her shoulders straight as she was led away by two of her own. 

Somehow, that moment of amusement seems to Phasma, when she thinks on it later, to be the moment at which her unbreakable resolve had begun to crack. She has never found Hux amusing before. Pompous, yes, but she has never before found that pomposity worthy of laughter. Once she has identified that Hux is funny, even ridiculous, in her solitary confinement in the brig she begins to find herself looking further afield, at Kylo Ren and his tantrums, even the Supreme Leader and his insistence upon appearing as a hologram; Phasma does not know of anyone who has even claimed to have met Snoke in person. After that she begins to find the rank and file officers quietly risible in their own pomposity, Mitaka and the rest of them all aspiring to be just like Hux; and eventually, even her own stormtroopers are not immune to her creeping realisation that really, the First Order is just ever so slightly ridiculous. Dangerous, deadly, for certain, but also, in all their regimentedness, their uniformity, even their self-assurance, Phasma cannot help but find her colleagues and leaders just a little bit laughable. 

She has always sneered at the Republic and the Resistance and their idiotic emphasis on individuality, but now Phasma finds herself beginning to find the idea a little intriguing. She begins to examine her face in the reflection in the bottom of the metal bowl her jailers serve her meals in; they had of course confiscated her armour when they threw her into the brig, and she is having to reaccustom herself to ordinary clothes, a simple suit of soft black trousers and long-sleeved shirt, and to the sight of her face, her actual face, rather than the helmet. For longer than she can remember, Phasma has only removed her armour in order to sleep; now she is bereft of it and having to get used again to the ease of movement afforded by her prison clothes, and her own face reflected in the metal. Her captain’s armour had set her apart, but she is coming to realise that it was more than just the armour; it was her own body, her own face, her own mind. She is taller than anyone else in the First Order, with the exception of the Supreme Leader’s hologram; she has heard one or two of the older stormtroopers, the ones who might just have witnessed the very end of the Rebellion, whisper that they thought she might even be taller than Darth Vader. She is certainly taller than Kylo Ren, by an inch or two at least, and she is quietly convinced that it rankles at him every time he looks at her. Nobody has seen her face. The troopers know what each other looks like under the helmets but Phasma has always taken care never to remove her helmet except in the privacy of her own quarters. And she has always possessed determination, dedication and resolve that are unique even among the stormtroopers; most of them have had at least one of those qualities programmed into them. Phasma has possessed them of her own accord all her life. 

But now, given six months in solitary confinement with only her own thoughts for company, Phasma finds that her amusement is giving way to questioning the purpose of the First Order, curiosity about the appeal of the Resistance. What might it be like to live under a regime which values one’s determination and resolve as individual qualities rather than as necessary attributes forced into one’s being? What might it be like to be allowed - perhaps even encouraged - to laugh at one’s colleagues, or even laugh with them? Where the contribution of the individual would be valued for more than just the presence of the individual, where one would be encouraged to think for oneself and contribute one’s own strengths to the greater good - well, Phasma is still inclined to snort at the idea of the greater good, but the idea of being encouraged to develop one’s own ideas rather than being valued only as a body to inhabit a suit of armour and shoot a blaster is certainly intriguing to her. And she has a lot of time to think upon it, here in solitary with nothing else to do between the reconditioning sessions. 

Phasma has never before needed reconditioning, although she knows well enough what it involves. Treatment both physical and mental to flush out the rebellious thoughts and actions and guide the individual back to the path set out for them. The Resistance would call it torture, she is sure, but Phasma has withstood worse before; for the first time her iron will is playing to her own benefit rather than that of the First Order, and even the best efforts of the reconditioners are failing to touch her newfound individuality, her recently discovered sense of humour. She is careful not to show them, of course, she parrots the phrases they want to hear from her, and she does not need her helmet to hide her true face from them. They interrogate her about her failure to stop the Resistance scum from achieving their objective; they subject her to extremes of temperature and threaten to break her every limb, but she carefully gives them only the answers they want to hear from her, and they are none the wiser. The reconditioning is perhaps less harsh because she does not resist, because she openly acknowledges her crime and repents for it, and they soon enough realise that they do not need to break her or reshape her. After that it all becomes a formality, going through the motions for the sake of fulfilling Hux’s order, and Phasma is fully capable of going along with them. It is only for six months, after all, and in the silence of her cell she finds that the reconditioning is only strengthening her new-found conviction that the First Order is no longer the place for her. It has been her home for as long as she can remember, has been mother and father, teacher and family to her, but now she feels like a child who has grown up, who has outgrown the lessons and strictures of childhood and is ready to step outside on her own. She is ready to live her own life and make her own decisions, and she no longer has need of the First Order’s unwavering structure. Snoke is using them all, she realises now, moving the stormtroopers and soldiers and even Kylo Ren like pieces on a game board as he prepares to destroy all vestiges of the New Republic and the Resistance and all other free-living beings in the galaxy so that he can rule it all. Not much point conquering the galaxy if everyone’s dead and there’s nobody left to rule, Phasma thinks, because she is not stupid and she knows that the cost of Snoke’s plans will be the loss of too many lives to count. She has never cared before now - she did not think far ahead enough to wonder what would happen after Snoke achieved his victory, she thought only of playing her part to help him achieve it, but now she wonders if there would have been a place for herself in the new regime, or whether she would have been merely Snoke’s muscle, ensuring the much-reduced population of the galaxy toed the line he had drawn. Not a fat lot to look forward to, then, and Phasma thinks that she is finally done thinking of anyone other than herself. Her priorities have shifted and she finds she no longer cares for Snoke’s vision of a galaxy subjugated. She is not sure that she particularly cares for the New Republic either - what’s left of it, at least - but the Resistance does sound like fun, she has to admit to herself.

Fun is not a concept that Phasma has had much time for - or indeed much to do with - hitherto, but now, remembering the holovid series on the defeat of the Empire that she was shown towards the beginning of her initial stormtrooper training, replaying it in her head, she thinks that despite the disapproving narration and the obvious bias towards the Empire and away from the rebels, it all did look like the most rip-roaringly good adventure. Running around the galaxy in rustbucket ships, hiding from the enemy, pulling off daring escapes and last-minute victories, seizing triumph from the jaws of defeat - Phasma didn’t see the appeal back then, being more intent on introducing order and discipline across the galaxy, but she is finally beginning to understand the attraction of rebellion. It is something that young people apparently indulge in, a natural progression that was something she always scorned when she was young herself, preferring the order and discipline of her own life, but now, finally, she is beginning to understand. Rebellion, and freedom to choose a life of her own - the very thought of them is intoxicating, and Phasma now knows what she will be doing when her long sentence of confinement is over. She is going to escape from the First Order - well, FN-2187 proved that it could be done, and unlike him, Phasma will have no need of assistance - and she will first find the Resistance, just because she can. She is not convinced that in the long term, their aims will mesh with hers, but there are plenty of other things to do in the great wide galaxy out there. Mercenary work, bounty hunting, law and order or peacekeeping, Phasma could do all of those things without breaking a sweat, but perhaps there are other things, too, trading and smuggling, piracy or craftsmanship or perhaps she will do a little of all of those things and then choose the one she enjoys most. Or perhaps she will do a little of all of those things and then find herself a nice little outpost and open a bar, or a restaurant, or a music-house or a cantina, and watch as others come to her door, listen as they tell her their tales. 

Perhaps she will do none of these things. Phasma has absolutely no experience of the world outside the First Order, and her only knowledge of all of these things comes from the holovids and datafiles from her training. The education materials made them all sound like thoroughly undesirable things to be doing, of course, but that only makes her now more keen than ever to give them a try. She has not truly lived so far, in all of her life, she realises now. She has been existing as a cog in a machine, a line of code in a program far larger than she can comprehend, and now it is time to break free and forge a real, true life for herself.

Phasma does not stop to think too hard about what she is doing, when she is finally released from her solitary confinement and reconditioning. She is escorted to her quarters by two of her own troopers - damn you, Hux, she thinks to herself, do you think you are ramming your message home, do you expect me to be shamed? - and she keeps her back straight and her head high every step of the way. She refuses to meet anyone’s gaze, though she can tell that plenty of them are staring through the lenses of their helmets; none of them have ever seen her face before. No matter, she thinks, let them stare. I will not flinch, I will not be broken.

When they reach the door of her cabin, Phasma dismisses her escort as cursorily as if the last six months had never happened. They hesitate, glancing at each other, and she raises an eyebrow; it takes a good few moments for one of them to gather her courage enough to speak - good, Phasma thinks, they are still intimidated by me. 

“General Hux said we should stay and make sure you settle back in all right, Captain,” says the trooper to her left, and the vocal modulator in her helmet does absolutely nothing to disguise her trepidation. 

Phasma rolls her eyes, just a little. “General Hux underestimates the efficacy of my punishment,” she says, may as well address it sooner rather than later. “I have no need of a guard. I simply wish to rest in my own quarters.” The two troopers glance at each other again, and Phasma gives them her most withering stare - she’s been practising it in the mirror, since she never had need for facial expressions before, but now she feels they may be useful. “Go,” she says. “You are not required here.”

It’s a good thing, she reflects later, that they are two of her own and have been on the receiving end of her wrath before; they are just a little bit more afraid of her than they are of Hux, and Phasma was counting on that to work in her favour. They shuffle a bit and then turn smartly to march off down the corridor, and Phasma only waits to see that they are truly gone before she opens the door and steps into her room.

She has not shared a room with anyone since she was promoted to Captain; by virtue of her rank, she has a single cabin. Phasma supposes that some people, after six months of solitary confinement and relentless reconditioning, might seek out the company of others, but not her. Her single room came as a relief and a reward on her promotion and she has always revelled in it. She tolerated shared quarters because she had to, but Phasma has always been a solitary soul and she much prefers her own company, even now. She closes the door behind her and allows herself to lean against it and close her eyes and breathe deeply, just for a moment, drawing the true solitude into herself - solitude by her own choosing, for the first time in six months. Then she opens her eyes and looks around the room. 

It is completely unchanged since the moment she left it to depart for Starkiller Base, although she knows that Hux will have had it fingertip-searched while she was imprisoned. His soldiers will have found nothing, of course; Phasma has very few possessions, and none of them could possibly have indicated that she was going to fail so spectacularly. She had not known it herself until it was already happening, after all. 

Now, however, is another matter entirely. Phasma knows exactly what she is going to do, and she is already taking pleasure in it despite herself, imagining the look on Hux’s ferrety face when he realises what she has done. Not just now, of course, but she is not planning on leaving it any longer than she needs to.

Her armour is resting on a stand in the corner, and she wonders briefly who thought to do that for her. Nobody here has seen inside her quarters, and nobody would have known that the last thing she did before she slept, every time she came to the end of a watch or a shift overseeing cadets, was to remove her armour piece by piece and place it carefully, reverentially, upon its stand. It was made from the ship of the Emperor himself and Phasma has always been more than proud of it. She almost puts it on now, longing to feel the familiar buckles and fittings closing around her limbs, the shining breastplate that enabled her troopers to see their own helmets as she addressed them, towering over all but the very tallest of them, though even the tallest could not quite look her in the eye. She wants to put her helmet back on, to subsume Phasma-the-person underneath Phasma-the-Captain again, she wants it so much that she can taste the longing, bitter and metallic on her tongue. But then, that would be the easy way, and she knows it. No matter how difficult the path ahead of her as Captain might be after her failure, it would still be easy compared to what she is planning to do. No, the armour must stay where it is. She cannot afford weakness, and she will have no need of it where she is going. In any case, it would make her plan more difficult to execute, at least in the final stages if not in the early ones.

Phasma glances around her again and sees nothing that she wishes to take with her. She has never been interested in personal mementoes, unless one counts her armour, and she has no room or time for sentimentality. All she needs is her blaster, which she is gratified to see is resting in its case on the desk against the wall. She tucks it into the belt of her standard-issue jumpsuit and makes for the door. She switches on the monitors beside the doorway and checks that there is no movement in the hallways around her, and then she steps out and closes the door behind her without a backward glance.

She steals along the corridors, taking a circuitous route to her destination and listening for patrols but fairly confident that she won’t actually bump into any; she has had the patrol patterns stored in her memory for years and years, and she sees no need for them to have been changed on her account. She is reconditioned, after all, and nobody will have foreseen exactly what form her reconditioning has taken. Besides, other than her exceptional height, there is nothing about her that would identify her to any patrol, for none of them has ever seen her out of her armour; none of them has seen her face, except her actual jailers, the few who saw her released, and the two troopers who escorted her to her quarters. If she is somehow caught, she will pass fairly easily as some lowly maintenance worker, as long as nobody thinks to wonder why someone with such height and such excellent military bearing is working as a janitor.

But nobody catches her. She has chosen her time and her route well, and she makes her way all the way to the hangar without so much as hearing a patrol. It is the work of a few moments to decouple a transport from its moorings, rig the exit doors and gain entrance; Phasma has not piloted a spacecraft in some time, but it is not something one forgets, she thinks. She is soon settled in the pilot’s seat, fiddling with the seat’s positioning to fit her legs beneath the console, and then all she needs to do is to fire up the engine and manoeuvre her way carefully to the exit, just another transport taking off for some routine flight or other. 

The intercom crackles of course, the control room wanting to know why they don’t have a departure scheduled at this time, but she bluffs her way through them, disguising her voice as best she can, given that helmet-distortion and communicator-distortion are alike enough that someone might recognise how she sounds - short-notice request from someone high-up, she doesn’t know the details, everything is fine, she’s sure the order just got delayed on its way to them - and then she is away, not actually bothering to wait for them to give her the okay, easing out of the hangar and peeling up through the atmosphere, punching in the co-ordinates she gained from her observations. The first leg of her journey is underway. Nobody follows her. She almost can’t believe how easy it’s been.

She spares herself a smirk for Hux, pompous Hux so sure of the efficacy of his punishment for her that it never occurred to him that it might have had the opposite effect. So sure that nobody will try to escape the First Order, even after the unfortunate incident with FN-2187 and the Resistance pilot. More fool him, and he is the one who will have to answer to Supreme Leader Snoke for her second crime. Phasma has no intention of being caught and dragged before the Supreme Leader to explain herself; she would rather die, and if the First Order catch up with her, she will put an end to it herself rather than let them take her back.

Her first destination is a star system across the Outer Rim from the First Order’s base, back out in charted space, and the hyperspace jump leaves her feeling a little disorientated, a little sick; it’s been a while since she last jumped, after all. She disables her vessel’s tracker just before the jump and sets her course, on emerging from hyperspace, and follows it all the way in to the spaceport, teeming with ships so diverse that one small First Order transport will blend right in. Charted space this may be, but it’s not so far into New Republic territory that anyone will wonder too much at the presence of a First Order ship. She gains permission to land from the control tower and easily pilots her way to the bay she is assigned. The first order of business - she allows herself a little chuckle at that, under her breath - is to offload the ship and get herself something more suited to her intentions, something fairly fast, a single-seater, a craft that will draw no attention at any of the stops she may have to make along her way.

Phasma makes her way out of the docking area, staying alert for somewhere she can trade her ship. She can afford to spend some time here, if necessary, she is in no great hurry since nobody seems to have followed her; and here, truly nobody will know her. All the galaxy at large knows about the First Order is the names of the Supreme Leader and Kylo Ren, and the fact that they have battalions of stormtroopers to enforce their will. Beyond that - nothing. And even if they knew about the tall captain with the shining chromium armour, there is nothing about her appearance now that would give her away to anyone but those who know her the best of all. Which means that there is nobody in the galaxy who would know who she is now, because nobody knows her at all.

She finds a bar and buys herself a drink she has no intention of drinking, and she keeps her ears open. She has observed Kylo Ren’s hunt for the Resistance and she has filed away in her memory the co-ordinates of all the places where Resistance activity has been reported; before, it was for operational reasons, but now it is of a different use for her. She will listen and she will find the clues that will lead her to her destination. It is not enough for her simply to leave the First Order; her only choice is to go to the Resistance and help them to destroy it. A life in hiding, disappearing to some backwater planet and reinventing herself, is no life for her, despite her idle contemplations during her solitary confinement; it has to be all or nothing, one side or the other, she knows that now. They will no longer be based on D’Qar, not after the destruction of Starkiller Base, of course, they will have had to move for Ren and Hux will have been hot on their heels when they fled. Their location will no doubt be secret, but Phasma is sure she will be able to pick up on rumours floating around, and eventually she will be able to piece them together. 

It takes a few days, but eventually she gets talking to a couple of likely-looking travellers, almost certainly smugglers from their general demeanour. She is careful not to reveal anything about herself and they are just as careful, which is a sure sign that they are up to no good, or at least very little good. Phasma gives them a false name and exchanges banter with them about spacecraft - she is improvising, but her studies over the years have given her a vast store of knowledge about all manner of things, and her experience of the stormtrooper cadets before the conditioning really took hold has taught her how ordinary people speak to each other. Eventually she slips into the conversation that she is looking for a ship, something small, to trade for a transport she stole - she conveniently does not mention the transport’s original owner - and wonders aloud if her new acquaintances might know someone who would be willing to make a trade. There is some equivocation, and a certain amount of back-and-forth, but after a couple more rounds of drinks they come up with a name, and after a couple more, where to find the individual concerned. They want to know where she’s heading, of course, but she has an answer ready for that, a misdirection on top of a misdirection. It’s none of their business, of course, and they know it, but she doesn’t want to make them think she has something particular to hide, or to give them anything to remember if someone comes asking questions on her trail.

Phasma makes her excuses after that and leaves the bar, heading off to find the trader the smugglers named. She is no closer to finding out where the Resistance might be, but no matter, she has plenty of other places to try. It’s probably about time she got out of here, anyway. 

She finds the trader and haggles her way to a deal; the trader drives a hard bargain, but Phasma is harder and she uses her height to intimidate him into agreeing to take her transport sight unseen and exchanging it for a slightly battered two-seater interplanetary shuttle. A dangerous move, perhaps, if someone comes asking after an unusually tall woman, but she is willing to take the chance. She makes sure she gets the access codes to the two-seater before she takes the trader to her transport, and she makes especially sure she is already disappearing into the crowd before he realises that she’s left him with a First Order ship. Not her problem any more. 

The shuttle is old but serviceable, and she gets it into the air before the trader gets back to his post, into the air and out of the atmosphere, punching in the co-ordinates for her next destination, not really caring whether she is going closer to the Resistance or further away. It will only take one stop, one clue, to find what she is looking for, and it doesn’t matter to her how hard she has to search to find it.

It takes a while, after all. Phasma spends probably about six months, by standard reckoning, hopping from planet to planet, observing and listening, learning along the way how to be an ordinary person, how to be the sort of person she has been pretending to be. She keeps her ears open, she picks up clues here and there, overheard snippets of conversations about the Resistance, half-mentions of raids and moves and campaigns, but no concrete clues as to the whereabouts of their base; nothing at all, until she lands in a little spaceport to refuel and sees the one ship she was never expecting to see here - the infamous Millennium Falcon is undergoing refuelling and repairs five bays away from where she has just landed. Phasma cannot quite believe her eyes - for starters, who is flying it now that the old scoundrel Solo is dead? - but she squares her shoulders and goes to find out what is going on. 

There is only one watering hole in this tiny place and Phasma spots her quarry as soon as she walks through the door - the Wookiee, of course, the small droid, both of them familiar from the training materials she was reading from her earliest days, not to mention that she has met the Wookiee before, and two hooded figures, one slender and graceful, the other thicker-set and more hesitant, stiffer in its movements. Phasma cannot see their faces, but she makes a snap decision and walks over to them. All four of them stiffen as she approaches, even the droid, which lets out a low, apprehensive little whistle, but she ignores the awkward atmosphere between them and pulls an empty chair towards them and sits down without waiting to be invited. 

“You’re with the Resistance,” she says. “I want to join you.” No point beating around the bush, after all; she might as well state her intentions up front.

They exchange glances and the slimmer one of the two hooded figures pushes back its hood, revealing itself as the girl Kylo Ren abducted from Takodana, the girl who mind-tricked one of Phasma’s better troopers and escaped her captivity just before Starkiller exploded. Phasma almost rolls her eyes, she probably should have known when she received the report, on the troop transport off the planet, before Hux made an example of her for her failure; who else but a Jedi could have pulled that off?

“How do you know who we are?” the girl demands, hotly, rashly, and the other hooded figure makes a gesture that anyone could interpret as meaning ‘be careful’.

Phasma laughs. “Anyone who studies their history books recognises these two.” She gestures at the Wookiee and the droid. “It stands to reason that they are with the Resistance, and you two look very much like Jedi to me, and where else would a Jedi be but in the Resistance, fighting alongside them? Besides, you were at Starkiller Base, were you not?”

The girl blinks. “How do you know _that_?” she asks, “you can’t read my mind.”

“I was there too,” Phasma says. “I saw you on the screens. I escaped the same as you did.”

“You were there? Then you must be First -“

“You can’t read her mind,” says the other Jedi, interrupting the girl before she can blurt it all out for all to hear, and his voice is deep and rough and scratchy, as though it hasn’t been used very much in a long time. “But I can read yours.” It’s a warning, but Phasma chooses to take it as a request. It’s the only way they will know they can trust her, after all.

“Be my guest,” she says, and leans back in her seat, hands palms outwards to face him, looking as non-threatening as she can.

The Jedi furrows his already considerably furrowed brow, his eyes slipping slightly out of focus, and Phasma feels a gentle nudging at the edge of her mind. This is nothing like the brutally invasive probing of Kylo Ren; Phasma has undergone that particular torture once or twice, and she will be a happy woman if she never has to experience it again. This is different, gentle, hesitant, as if waiting for further permission though Phasma has already told him he may feel free to go ahead. She nods and thinks ‘it’s all yours,’ and the Jedi smiles very faintly as he steps into her mind. It’s a curious feeling, almost like having someone else poke around in one’s wardrobe, but it’s not unpleasant. Phasma does her best to show him that she is not hiding anything from him, not putting up walls; she shows him her realisation of the ridiculousness of the First Order and of Kylo Ren, and feels his amusement rippling back across the connection between them, hastily hidden and shot through with self-reproach. Interesting. Phasma will have to unpick that one later - she will not be doing it now, while he’s still taking the tour of her brain, but she is interested to know why he feels guilt at being amused by her revelation.

After a few moments more, the old Jedi withdraws from her mind, his eyes refocussing and a small smile threatening to break out of hiding behind his beard. Phasma suppresses the urge to sit up straighter under his scrutiny, she is no longer a soldier and this man is by no means her commander, and yet she feels a sense of authority from him, authority long denied. She almost feels self-conscious, and that is not something she thinks she has ever felt before in all her life.

“So,” he says eventually, breaking the silence that the girl, on the edge of her seat and almost vibrating with tension, has obviously been dying to break herself; and yet she has held herself back, and Phasma wonders why. It’s probably that air of venerable authority he exudes, and although Phasma does not know what they are to each other, she would hazard a guess that they are at the very least teacher and student. The Wookiee has been sitting in silence, its eyes on her in an unwavering stare, and the droid is emitting a low, tense hum, but they both seem content to wait for the old man to speak.

“So,” he says again after a moment, apparently collecting his thoughts. “You are - or you were - a stormtrooper, a captain in the First Order’s army, and you decided to defect and come in search of the Resistance because you suddenly realised that the First Order are _funny_.” He pauses, his voice taut with something that might be sarcasm. “And you were expecting them to believe you?”

“It’s the truth,” Phasma says, trying not to sound defensive, and she is suddenly acutely aware of the look of disbelief on the face of the girl Jedi. She has been aware from the beginning that hers is a very precarious situation and her very survival depends on the Resistance believing her, but not until now has she really realised how much danger she has placed herself in.

The old man lets out a soft, reluctant laugh. “I know it is. I’ve seen it. You showed it to me and I do not believe that you have the skill to show me a lie. Very few people do.” He pauses, and Phasma has the distinct impression that there are words that should be filling this little silence, that this should not be a gap in their conversation, but that the old man simply cannot bear to speak them. Someone has shown this man a lie in their thoughts, and it has wounded him deeply. Phasma is beginning to put the pieces together, but he is speaking again before she can get very far. “You are lucky that you met me before the others. I can tell that your story is true and I will vouch for you if you wish me to do so. The Resistance’s leadership will listen to me.” He pauses again and gives her a sad smile. “At least, I hope they will. Much time has passed and much has happened since I was last in a position of influence.”

“You’re still influential, Master,” the girl breaks in, unable to contain herself any longer. “They’ve been looking for you for years and years, they always wanted you to come back.”

The Wookiee lets out a groan at that, and the old man smiles again, a little more certainly this time. “You are both kinder than I deserve. In any case, young woman, if you wish to join the Resistance, your best chance is to come with us. I will vouch for you. Beyond that, it will be up to you.”

“Thank you,” Phasma says, wondering if this is the first time she has thanked someone in all sincerity, the first time she has accepted an offer of assistance that means so much to her.

“Don’t thank me yet,” says the old Jedi. “You have a hard road ahead of you, because I can vouch for the truth of your story, but only you can prove your true intentions to my sister, and she does not trust easily or suffer fools gladly. You will have to earn any place you wish to occupy.”

The mention of the man’s sister sets a few more cogs turning in Phasma’s memory, but again she has no chance to follow her train of thought, for the girl is cutting in.

“So what’s your name?” she demands. “Mine’s Rey. I suppose you know who Chewbacca and R2-D2 are.” She doesn’t offer up the old man’s name, though, Phasma notices, and that can only be significant. Presumably they are travelling at least a little bit incognito, which would imply that the old man is someone of considerable consequence. Well, who else was the Resistance looking for, and who else was the First Order desperate to find before the Resistance got hold of him?

“My name is Phasma,” she says. “Or at least, that is the name I was given by the First Order when I earned my rank. If I ever had another, I have never known it.” She has been giving various false names to the others she has encountered on her adventure, of course, but in this case it would seem to be a good move to give them the name she has gone by for almost as long as she can remember. She can’t think of a different one, anyway, or a better one, so she may as well stick to Phasma.

The old man nods, confirming her name, having seen it in her mind, of course, and she is glad she did not make one up, even as the girl says, “Phasma! You’re Captain Phasma? Finn told me about you, he said - “ and she breaks off, a look of barely concealed horror in her eyes.

Phasma sighs, she should have known that FN-2187 would have been exercising his apparently not-inconsiderable talent for talking on the subject of her brutality to anyone in the Resistance who would listen, for who else could the girl - Rey - mean by ‘Finn’? “I _was_ Captain Phasma,” she says, doing her best to sound as bored as possible. “One does not rise to the rank of Captain in the stormtrooper army by being everyone’s best friend.”

“So what are you doing here, then, if you were a ‘Captain in the stormtrooper army’?” Rey mimics Phasma’s offhand tone, overlaying it with a goodly layer of sarcasm. 

“Joining the Resistance, as I told you. Your ‘master’ already explained my reasons, if only briefly. I am sure you trust him, although I do not expect you to trust me."

“Enough, Rey,” says the old Jedi. “You can question our guest later if you wish, but for now I think you should go and see about finding out when our ship will be ready for us to depart.”

The girl subsides into a stubborn-jawed sulk, evidently not improved when the Wookiee lets out another groan. “I did _not_!” she bursts out. “I’m still getting used to it, it’s not my fault Plutt messed up the stabilisers and I didn’t realise it until I really needed them!” The Wookiee groans again and the girl stands up and flounces out of the bar, to a flurry of concerned beeps from the droid and a sound from the Wookiee that Phasma would swear was laughter. The old man is hiding a smile behind his beard again, and Phasma finds that the Resistance might be funny too - but perhaps not ridiculous.

The old man signals to the bartender for a round of drinks and, when they arrive, tips his cup to Phasma. “I will bring you to the Resistance as a guest,” he says, “but believe me, at the first sign of trouble I will have no hesitation in making you a prisoner, and I am sure that Rey will have even less hesitation in doing so. Besides, I am sure that you would not be so stupid as to pit yourself against two Force-users and a Wookiee, former Captain in the First Order’s stormtrooper army though you may be.”

Phasma nods, taking the warning and the invitation as one. “I would rather arrive as your guest,” she acknowledges. “Believe me, I will be no trouble to you. In fact, I hope that I may be useful.”

“I’m sure you will be,” says the old man, and they clink their cups against each other, only a little warily, and Phasma begins to feel something very strange that is almost like belonging. 

By the time Rey returns with the news that the Millennium Falcon is repaired, refuelled and ready to fly, Phasma, the Wookiee and the old Jedi have finished their drinks, and Phasma has had enough time with her thoughts to work out that this indeed must be the legendary Luke Skywalker, the last remaining Jedi, and surely the person who hid the truth from him behind a lie must be Kylo Ren, his sister’s son. 

They file onboard the ship, and Phasma is not sorry to be leaving her little shuttle behind. Someone will take possession of it, she is sure, and she does not care what fate might befall it now that she has abandoned it. She is left to herself during takeoff, but once they are out of atmosphere and cruising, she is not surprised to find herself joined at the holochess table by the young Jedi girl, her jaw set in a determined line. 

“So you’re Captain Phasma,” she says without any preamble as she drops into the seat opposite Phasma.

“I was,” Phasma replies. “Now I’m just Phasma. I’m sure the First Order won’t be giving me my rank back any time soon.”

“How do we know you’re not on some secret undercover mission to infiltrate the Resistance?” Rey demands, no pussyfooting around with her, it is clear. “Finn’s told me about you, the only people more First Order than you are Ren and Hux.”

“Your master saw the truth in my mind,” Phasma says. “You’ll have to trust him.”

“What if you’ve learned to cover up the truth?” Rey wants to know. “What if Ren’s put the false story in your mind, what if he’s even made you think it’s the truth?”

“He didn’t,” says Phasma definitely, although she has to wonder, for a brief moment, what if the girl has unwittingly hit upon the truth? What if Phasma’s great revelation was implanted in her mind by Kylo Ren? She dismisses the thought briskly, she knows it wasn’t. It wasn’t him, it was all her, the first independent thought she’s ever had, and she won’t let this girl’s suspicions take that away from her. “Believe me, I would not have allowed that overgrown teenager to implant anything in my mind.”

Rey smothers a giggle at that, clapping a hand over her mouth and looking vaguely horrified at herself, and Phasma answers with a small smile. 

“You’ve met him, then,” she says, utterly deadpan, and Rey giggles again, an undignified snort that escapes from behind her hand, too great to smother. The girl dissolves into helpless laughter, and Phasma allows herself to smile a little more.

“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” Rey says after a few moments, struggling to calm herself. “It was horrible. _He_ was horrible. But oh, Force help me, you’re right, that’s exactly what he is.”

“Perhaps now you might wonder a little less that I might come to find the First Order somewhat ridiculous,” says Phasma. “When they are all running around according to the whims of that overgrown boy, and that pompous general, while all the time their so-called Supreme Leader plays them all for fools.” She snorts. “I came to see it all, and I decided I wanted no more part in it.”

“But Finn said…” Rey trails off, an expression of puzzlement coming over her face; she is clearly having trouble reconciling the monstrous Captain about whom she must have heard so much with the dry-witted, sardonic woman sitting across the table from her.

“FN-Finn,” Phasma corrects herself, she had better start using the name her former trooper has chosen for himself, “- encountered me before I came to that realisation. He knew the First Order’s best soldier. Since then I have had my outlook on life somewhat recalibrated, shall we say?” 

“What happened?” Rey asks. 

“Six months’ solitary confinement and reconditioning,” Phasma states baldly. “I assume he told you he captured me? He and the Wookiee and the old smuggler?”

A strange look passes over Rey’s face, sadness and fear combined, and Phasma has the sudden feeling she has said the wrong thing. “I haven’t spoken to Finn since Starkiller Base,” she says after a moment, her voice soft and slightly unsteady. “He was - injured. Ren got him, caught him with his lightsabre. He was still unconscious when I left to find L-to find my master.”

“I know who he is,” Phasma says, uncharacteristically gently. She finds she is rather taking a liking to this direct, impulsive young Jedi. “The whole First Order was looking for him, remember? Although he does look rather different these days to the pictures from the holovids they showed us in training.” She allows herself another small smile. “Anyway, your friends captured me - I assume you knew Solo as well?”

Rey nods, another pained expression flitting across her face. Phasma did not see Solo’s death, of course, being by that point too busy breaking her way out of the chamber she’d been locked into, but she heard all about it later on; by all accounts Ren was in a worse mood than usual for weeks on end, from what she overheard from her jailers’ conversations, but she hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to care. Rey had clearly cared for the old smuggler, though, and Phasma finds that she doesn’t quite know what to say to comfort her. She opts instead to continue her story and pretend Rey isn’t looking stricken.

“They captured me and forced me to lower the shields on the base. I am sure you can imagine that I was given a punishment fitting to my crime.”

“But - doesn’t reconditioning make you back into a good stormtrooper again?” Rey can’t help asking, her curiosity winning out over her grief. “Finn said that was what they did when a stormtrooper wasn’t good enough, or when they made a mistake. He said you were going to send him to be reconditioned after he didn’t fire his blaster on Jakku.”

“Usually it does,” Phasma says, “and yes, I was. Clearly he’s lucky he managed to win that pilot over before I had a chance to make sure it happened.” She pauses for a moment. “I am most likely the only one whose broken conditioning was only broken further by the reconditioning process.” She shrugs. “I couldn’t tell you for sure; I’m sure you would not be surprised to know that the First Order does not generally talk about its failures.”

Rey nods. “So was that really it?” she asks. “You suddenly realised that the First Order was all really stupid, and decided to come and find the Resistance instead?”

“That’s more or less it,” says Phasma. “Obviously it took a little longer than that, but with six months in solitary confinement I had all the time in the galaxy to think it over and put it together.” 

“So you didn’t want to just go off and do something else, you decided that not only were you going to escape, you were going to head straight for the people who are actively working against the First Order.” Rey shakes her head. “Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, you being who you are - or were - but, I don’t know, if it was me, I’d probably have just wanted to get as far away as possible and then just live in peace and obscurity.” She wrinkles her nose. “Well, except that that’s what I spent most of my life doing already, before I joined the Resistance. Or rather, before it found me. Or rather, before _Finn_ found me. If it wasn’t for him, I’d still have been hidden away on Jakku, with no idea of who I was or what I could do.” 

Phasma raises her eyebrows. “So who _are_ you? And what can you do?” The girl’s pronouncement sounded meaningful, more so than if she were just a desert rat from Jakku - well, obviously she is training to be a Jedi, but that raises more questions than it answers.

Rey shrugs. “I’m Rey. I don’t know who my family are - or were - but I think Luke knows, and General Organa definitely knows. They just haven’t seen fit to tell me yet. I don’t mind, I’ve spent this long not knowing, not remembering them, I can wait a little longer.” She gives a proud little smile. “I’m learning patience. And a whole lot of other things. As for what I can do - “ she reaches out her right hand towards the corner of the deck and extends her fingers, flicking her hand towards her in a beckoning gesture, and a small sphere rolls forward out of the pile of junk and begins to levitate. Rey furrows her brow and beckons again, and the thing floats closer, wobbling in the air before dropping to the floor with a clanking sound. Rey huffs in frustration. “I’m still learning. Apparently the Force is strong with me but I hadn’t had any training, or not any that I can remember, before I went to get Luke, so everything’s still a bit hit-and-miss.”

“So that’s why you couldn’t read my mind,” Phasma guesses, and Rey nods, only a little frustrated.

“Not yet. Apparently it takes a whole lot more training for a Jedi to read the mind of someone who isn’t Force-sensitive.” She flinches. “I read Kylo Ren’s mind, though, but that was by accident. And it was horrible.” She clearly does not want to talk about that any further, and Phasma decides not to push her; it clearly isn’t going to be necessary information for her to have, anyway. Rey shakes her head, collecting herself, and takes a deep breath before continuing. “Anyway. I can’t read your mind, or not yet at least. But I can use a lightsabre, sort of, and I’m learning to get better at that. It’s not all that different from the staff I grew up using on Jakku. And I can make people do things, if I concentrate really hard.”

“So I hear,” Phasma says, somewhat sardonically, and she is finding that actually she’s enjoying this conversation, enjoying Rey’s company, and the feeling is so unfamiliar that she hardly knows what to make of it. “You persuaded one of my best troopers to let you escape and leave you his weapon.” She pauses, mostly for effect, and then continues. “I am sure you can imagine the temper tantrum that Kylo Ren threw once he found out about that. If he had had his way, JB-007 would have undergone a far worse punishment than I did, although if anyone should understand that JB-007 was not responsible for his actions, he should. Ren is certainly not averse to using the Force to get his way.”

Rey giggles a little, presumably at the thought of Ren’s tantrum, and Phasma decides to take advantage of the young Jedi’s apparent acceptance of her and ask her for a favour.

“May I ask you something?”

“Fire away,” says Rey, sitting back a little in her seat, looking more relaxed than she has since Phasma sat down at her table in the bar.

“If you are in communication with the Resistance base, would you refrain from telling FN- I mean, Finn, who I am? I would rather he did not know in advance that I am coming. Quite understandably, he is not going to be inclined to be in favour of my getting a fair hearing, and I would prefer it if he did not spend the time before our arrival telling your general all the reasons why she shouldn’t even allow me to set foot on the base.”

Rey frowns. “I see your point, but Finn’s my friend. My _best_ friend. And he’s been through so much, Phasma,” she pauses, and is good enough not to point out that Phasma was responsible for much of Finn’s trauma, “it’s going to be a terrible shock to him, seeing you.”

Phasma nods, not really surprised by Rey’s reluctance. “He won’t know me,” she says. “He’s never seen me out of my armour, and he’s never seen my face.”

“He’s still going to find out sooner or later, and it’s going to be a shock. He’s frightened of you and I can well understand why. I owe him everything, I can’t just drop this on him.”

“Well. Could you wait to break it to him until we arrive? I would rather be able to answer his misgivings for myself, and with Skywalker’s support. All I ask for is a fair hearing, and I won’t get that if he’s been babbling to Skywalker’s sister about how evil I am.”

Rey pulls a face. “I suppose so. If Luke is prepared to vouch for you, then I guess the least we can do is give you that fair hearing. But I still have to protect Finn. We’ll take you straight to General Organa when we arrive, but I’ll be going straight to Finn to prepare him. Will that do?” The tone of her voice and the jut of her chin both tell Phasma that it’ll have to do, and so she nods; in reality she is probably in no position to make demands, despite the information she can bring to the Resistance about the First Order - well, it’s mostly a year out of date, except for the few snippets she managed to overhear during her imprisonment, and even those are six months old or more by now. But she thinks that by appealing to Rey’s sense of fairness - presumably the Jedi deal in fairness and giving people a chance - she will have her best chance of being allowed to speak for herself and persuade the general that she can be useful. She will just have to deal with the hostility she is expecting from FN-2187 - Finn, she means Finn, she must remember that he has a name now - as and when it arises.

When Rey and Chewbacca bring the Millennium Falcon in to land at the Resistance’s new base - they have indeed moved away from D’Qar, although the Falcon’s crew have been careful not to name its new location in Phasma’s hearing, for trust only goes so far, and she would have done the same in their position - there is a brief conference as to how to handle the assembled crowd. It is decided that Rey and R2-D2 will go first, to distract Finn, if he is up and about by now, and then Skywalker and Chewbacca will bring Phasma down the ramp between them. They don’t say it, but they are taking the precautions it is possible to take, against the possibility that Phasma has deceived them all along and might be planning to assassinate General Organa. Phasma understands this, and again she would have done the same in their position; she hands her blaster to Chewbacca before they walk down the ramp.

Rey, ahead of them with the droid, takes the first few steps slowly, scanning the crowd, and breaks into a trot as she spots her quarry; Phasma is faintly amused to see that FN-2187 - Finn, _Finn_ , she is going to have to remember his name if she is going to make anything of herself in the Resistance - is standing with the Resistance pilot who helped him escape. Well. She has heard that extreme circumstances may create unexpectedly strong bonds between individuals, and that certainly seems to stand true for those three, who are now hugging each other tightly, and Phasma exchanges a glance with Skywalker; now would be a good time. She walks between the Jedi and the Wookiee, her hands carefully at her side - she is a guest, after all, and not a prisoner - and follows their lead as they head directly for the tiny woman at the front of the crowd. Phasma has to blink, this is the infamous General Leia Organa? The holovids did not make clear how incredibly small the woman is. Phasma feels almost twice her height.

Chewbacca wraps the general up in a hug first, leaving Phasma and Skywalker standing slightly awkwardly, and Phasma is well aware that the eyes of almost all the crowd are upon them, for of course they were all expecting Skywalker and they must be curious as to who this woman is who has arrived with them. And then the Wookiee puts the little woman down and she turns to her brother, unspoken words tense in the air between them, years of pain in their gaze. 

Eventually, Skywalker breaks the silence. “I’ve brought you a new recruit, Leia,” he says quietly. “Someone who can give you a great deal of information about the First Order.”

The woman’s eyebrows go up and she turns her gaze to Phasma for the first time, looking her up (and up, and up) and down. “Is that so?”

Phasma nods. “If you don’t mind, general, may I speak with you somewhere a little less public? There are some here who may not welcome me.” Her gaze flicks to Finn. “Or at least, who would advise you to dismiss me without allowing me a chance to speak.”

“Oh, really?” The general’s voice is tense with sarcasm, and wary but curious, and Skywalker takes half a step forward. 

“She’s genuine, Leia, I will guarantee it. But you do want to speak to her somewhere quieter. Hear what she has to say before everyone else starts shouting.”

The woman nods sharply. “Follow me.” She turns on her heel, and Phasma sees that here is a woman who wastes no time and no words. She can respect that. Phasma falls into line behind her, flanked again by Skywalker and the Wookiee, and follows the woman into the nearest building. They pass along a corridor and into what looks like a conference room, a long table with chairs along each side, an ancient-looking holoboard on one wall. Chewbacca shuts the door behind them, and the general turns to face them, arms folded. “So. What’s your story?”

Phasma resists the urge to salute. “My name is Phasma. I was a captain in the First Order until approximately six months ago.”

The general nods. “I’ve heard of you.” 

“I defected, and I came to find the Resistance, and I found your brother and his friends purely by chance while I was looking for clues as to your whereabouts,” Phasma continues in an even voice, pretending to herself that she is not intimidated.

“Clues, hm? And had you found any, before you ran into my brother?” 

“Not a one,” Phasma admits. “Only rumours. I imagine that had I not come upon the Millennium Falcon in a little backwater trading post, I would still be looking for you.”

“Good.” General Organa nods again. “So, you defected. What prompted that? From what I understand, you are - or should I say were? - the most dedicated captain in the entire First Order.”

Phasma arranges her features into an expression that she hopes conveys contrition and sincerity. “I was. I know that you will have heard nothing good about me from FN - from Finn.”

The general’s lips twitch, and Phasma is not certain, but she thinks she reads amusement in the woman’s face. “On the contrary, as it happens. He has told me that you were dedicated not only to the First Order but also to your troopers. He says you knew all of their numbers and knew them by sight even when you could not see their faces. He has also told me that even under extreme pressure you had no doubt in their abilities to deal with whatever he and his friends were planning to do.” She pauses to let that sink in, and Phasma thinks that her expression right now is probably more thunderstruck than contrite. “Don’t get me wrong, he also expressed a very strongly-held opinion that you were the sort of woman who would die for your cause, and all the evil that implies, given what your cause is - or was. So I must ask you, what made you change your mind? Or are you here as a spy for your Supreme Leader,” her voice suddenly drips poison, and then becomes pure steel as she says, “or my son?”

Phasma is fairly sure she is not imagining the pain hiding behind the steel, or the way both Chewbacca and Skywalker tense beside her at the mention of Kylo Ren. She takes a deep breath and prepares to explain, not entirely sure whether she wants to tell this iron-willed woman that one of the main reasons she left the First Order was that she couldn’t stop rolling her eyes at the general’s son.

Thankfully, Skywalker steps in at this point, making good on his promise to vouch for her. “They put her in solitary for what she did - for what Han and Chewie and Finn made her do. Solitary and reconditioning, for six months. And yet she came out the other side with no conviction other than that the First Order is completely, hilariously ridiculous. If you can believe that.” He pauses, that smile hiding in his beard again. “Although I strongly suggest that you do, because it’s the truth. I’ve seen it in her mind, she allowed me to look, and I am convinced that she does not have the capability to hide her true intentions from me.”

The general’s eyebrows are nearly disappearing into her hair by this point, as she flicks her gaze back to Phasma. “Is this true?” she demands. “Their reconditioning left you with nothing but a sense of humour?”

Phasma shrugs a tiny bit. “I’d already gained that by the time they started the reconditioning. It started with General Hux handing me my sentence - he is terribly pompous, I don’t know if you’ve ever met him. And Kylo Ren’s tantrums once he realised that the girl - Rey - had Jedi mind-tricked one of my best troopers and escaped, and, it seems, bested him in a lightsabre duel although she had never handled one before. I’m sorry,” she apologises as an afterthought, remembering that she is speaking to Ren’s mother. “I’m sorry, it’s just - well. Completely ridiculous. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it, and I realised that I was no longer willing to lay down my life for something so laughable. They took my armour from me and I found myself learning to know _myself_ again, my own self. I learned who I was and I did not wish to return to the identity that was nothing more than the best captain in the army. I wanted to be an actual person, and it just made sense to come to the Resistance. And that’s all of it. I will swear to you on anything you care to name that I am no spy.”

“We’ll see about that,” says the general. “And if Finn gives you any trouble, well - he of all people ought to know that it’s possible to break the First Order’s conditioning. You might like to point that out to him.” 

Phasma blinks, the general has a point, but knowing Finn, he probably isn’t going to see things in quite the same way. She’s about to say something when the general looks her up and down again and steps back.

“Well,” she says. “You’ll do, for now. If you’ll excuse me, I need to speak with my brother. You’ll understand, of course, that you’ll be getting absolutely no access to any details of our operations, or our locations, for the immediate future. And you’ll be expected to make yourself useful. Strategy, combat training, information about the First Order, kitchen duty, wherever you can be most help. Frequent debriefings by my officers. Prepare yourself not to be accepted straight away. Although if you’re genuine, who knows, Finn settled in pretty well.” She turns on her heel, gesturing to Skywalker to follow her, and Phasma finds herself left alone in the conference room with the Wookiee. They exchange a look, and Chewbacca shrugs, lets out a moan, and beckons her to follow. Well, it makes sense to leave her with probably the one being on the entire base who could subdue her physically, should such a thing become necessary.

Phasma trails the Wookiee out of the conference room and through a labyrinth of corridors, the walls and ceilings looking distinctly pre-fabricated and more than a little rickety. Presumably the Resistance had had to flee D’Qar and set up base here in a hurry. Not the sort of organisation with much call for a permanent headquarters, or at least, not at the moment, and by the time it gets to that status, if it ever does, it probably won’t need to call itself the Resistance any more. There are a few people about, but not many; Phasma assumes that most people are outside greeting the returned Jedi girl. She glances through a few open doors on their way past, but nothing tells her anything other than that this must be the part of the base where the strategic planning gets done. Lots of screens, lots of chairs and tables, everything looking distinctly the worse for wear and somewhat antiquated, and more than anything else, completely anonymous. Phasma wouldn’t be able to find her way back to that conference room, or to the outside world, if she’d wanted to; she is completely, comprehensively lost. Another tactic to keep her on the back foot, she is sure, but she doesn’t mind, or even care. Paranoia is reasonable.

Eventually, after what seems like an eternity of walking, Chewbacca pushes open a set of double doors and Phasma follows him through them into a large room which is clearly functioning as a canteen; groups of Resistance personnel are seated around tables, some eating quietly, but more chatting animatedly, and Phasma catches the word “Skywalker” more than once. Of course, it is not surprising that the return of the last Jedi should be the only topic of conversation, but Phasma is obscurely relieved that she is not hearing ‘stormtrooper’ as well. 

Her relief lasts precisely as long as it takes them to walk across the hall to the table in the far corner, the occupants of which are making more noise than the rest of the room put together. Of course. Rey is sitting there, her back to the room so she cannot see Phasma and Chewbacca approaching, with Finn on one side of her and the pilot he’d convinced to help him escape on the other, a small BB unit rolling back and forth excitedly at their feet - presumably the one that everyone in the First Order was making all the fuss about, though it’s too late now, given that the Resistance got to Skywalker first. They are flanked by a motley crew of individuals in similar clothing to the pilot, presumably his cohorts, along with R2-D2 and a golden droid whose unit designation Phasma is at a loss to recall; it looks like a 3PO unit, but one that has been built from scratch out of whatever parts its maker had to hand, and it has a definitely non-standard red left arm.

The R2 unit spots them first and lets out a low whistle, and Rey turns, followed by Finn and the pilots and the other droids, until everyone is looking at them. Rey gives Phasma a small, encouraging smile, and Phasma tries to return it in kind, although facial expressions are still not something she is particularly good at and she is horribly afraid she may be grimacing instead. She hangs back a little, behind the Wookiee, hoping to deflect attention away from herself, at least at first; this is not at all how she had envisaged her initial reunion with her former trooper FN-2187, and the situation is not at all ideal.

“Hey, Chewie,” says Finn in greeting, getting up a little stiffly to wrap his arms around the Wookiee’s mid-section. “Hey, thanks for getting me off of Starkiller, I never had chance to say before, you’d gone before I woke up.” The Wookiee moans softly, and Finn frowns, until the BB unit chirps and Rey translates the translation as an enquiry after Finn’s health. “I’m good, man, I’m okay, it all still kinda hurts but I’m doing better.” He catches sight of Phasma standing behind Chewbacca, but his eyes skate over her without a single glimmer of recognition in them. “Hey, Rey said you brought _Captain Phasma_ in, did you take her straight to the general, you gotta be careful of her, she’s a stone cold…” He trails off as Chewbacca groans and shrugs and tips his head in Phasma’s direction, and honestly, if Phasma weren’t so nervous (and when was the last time she was _nervous_?), she would find the look on his face as he puts two and two together more than hilarious. 

Finn gapes like a Sarlacc for a good thirty seconds or so, throat working, brain evidently trying to push words to the mouth but not quite managing it, and Rey, may the Supreme - no, may the stars bless her, steps smoothly into the breach. 

“This is Phasma, Finn. You don’t need to worry. She isn’t a threat.”

Finn splutters, evidently getting his words back. “But…but, not a threat, why isn’t she in custody, she’s _dangerous_ , Rey, she’s the best soldier, she’s First Order through and through, she’s…”

“She says she isn’t, and Master Luke says she isn’t, and he’s looked in her mind, and I trust him,” Rey says, softly but firmly, and Phasma, occupying herself with looking as non-threatening as possible, is dimly aware that the other pilots have gathered close around Finn, protectively, the one who helped him escape - what was his name, Dameron? - resting a strong hand on Finn’s shoulder.

“I broke my conditioning, just like you did, Finn,” Phasma says, keeping her voice pitched low and soft, nothing like the commanding tone she used to use through the vocal synthesiser in her helmet. She remembers to use his name rather than his number, and she mentally congratulates herself on that. “I realised how ridiculous it all is. How completely laughable. The six months of solitary confinement and reconditioning I received as punishment for allowing you to capture me only served to reinforce my realisation.”

“Laughable?” Finn’s voice is incredulous. “The First Order is slaughtering its way across the galaxy and you think it’s _funny_?” He lunges forward, only held back by Dameron’s hand on his shoulder and Rey’s sudden grip on his arm. “It’s kidnapping children and turning them into murderers, and that’s laughable?”

Phasma does her best not to step back in the face of his anger, searches her brain for the right words to explain. She doesn’t much care for the galaxy at large, it’s the First Order’s crimes against herself that she has taken exception to, but she senses that might not be the best way of putting it. “No, it isn’t,” she says after a moment, still keeping her voice low and even. “It’s terrible, but the fact that it’s all being carried out at the behest of a pompous general, an overgrown teenager and a so-called supreme being who never appears in person, only as a hologram…that is ridiculous. Or at least, you can find it risible, or you can despair. You can use your scorn as motivation to overthrow them, or you can lie down and die.” She takes a breath. “I might have lain down and died in my cell, I might have allowed the reconditioning to take me back. But I find now that I have seen a different way, it is not in my nature to give up. So I am here, to lend what help I can.” She pauses, and then takes a gamble. “You are looking well, Finn. Freedom is obviously agreeing with you.” She hopes he can detect the concern in her voice; she isn’t putting it on, she finds she is really, genuinely glad to see that her former charge is doing so well.

Finn doesn’t respond to her compliment, swallowing hard instead as he processes her words. “And how do we know you’re not under Kylo Ren’s creepy hypnotism control?”

“Luke Skywalker has looked into my mind. I can’t hide anything from him, I don’t know how. And I think he knows Kylo Ren’s signatures. Ren is his nephew and was his student, I think he would recognise his work, if he had implanted all this in my mind.” She allows herself a little smile. “And I honestly don’t think Ren has the sense of humour to implant into my mind the idea that he and Hux and the rest of them are the most ridiculous beings in the galaxy.”

Finn snorts, but he doesn’t answer that; Rey instead murmurs, “It’s true, Finn, Master Luke said so, and I promise you, if we can trust anyone we can trust him.”

Looking Phasma up and down, Finn suddenly gives a tiny smile. “I would never have known you. Even with how tall you are, I’d never have known.” He shakes his head. “You knew what all of us looked like, you knew all our numbers, you always believed in us even when we failed, though you never would’ve said so. You made us better. We were terrified of you, terrified of what you’d say if we failed. And none of us ever once saw your face.”

“It helped,” Phasma says, honestly. “If you thought of me as something other, something more than just another stormtrooper. Just as Ren wears his mask to intimidate, so did I. Only I didn’t truly know who I was, just as you didn’t. The First Order is expert at eradicating all hints of the individual, and yet it could not eradicate your empathy for your fellows, and it could not eradicate my concern for my soldiers. I was taken in childhood just as you were, Finn. I don’t remember my family, or my name if I ever had one. All I know is that my determination, my dedication and my will are all my own; they were mine before I ever set foot in a First Order reconditioning suite. It’s time for me to turn them to the service of something that sees me as an individual, as a person, not a body in a suit of armour - just as it was time for you to do the same.”

Finn nods. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “Okay. If you say so. I just…I’m gonna need some time. To get my head around…this. You.”

“I hadn’t expected anything different,” Phasma says. “I am well aware that I’m going to have to prove myself to each and every person on this base.”

“Got that right,” says Dameron, his hand still on Finn’s shoulder even though Finn doesn’t really look like he needs the support any more. “So, is the General just letting you walk around on your own, or what?”

Chewbacca makes another of his unintelligible noises, and Rey and the infamous BB unit translate between them. “Chewbacca is keeping an eye on Phasma for now,” Rey says, “and she is to be given no access to any information that might be of use to the First Order, including where we are. The General said she’s to make herself useful.” Rey gives Phasma a considering look. “So what can you do?”

Phasma blinks, slightly taken aback. “Well, most of my experience is in combat and combat training. I don’t know your weaponry, but I can give you a good insight into how a stormtrooper thinks and fights. Although Finn might - “ she stops herself, unsure of what to say; she does not wish to steal Finn’s thunder, if he’s already been teaching the Resistance’s fighters about how to tackle a stormtrooper.

“No, you go ahead,” Finn shrugs. “I’m still recuperating, and anyway, I’m not so fond of fighting, these days. Having a choice is a pretty great thing.” He sinks back into his chair with an exhausted sigh, and the pilots seem to take this as a signal that everything is all right, for now at least, and return to their own seats. 

Chewbacca grabs a pair of chairs from a nearby table and everyone shuffles up, and almost before Phasma realises it, she is surrounded by people, most of them eyeing her warily but all apparently keen to hear whatever she has to say. “All right,” she says after a moment, “so I could give your fighters some training on our - on the First Order’s ground troops. I designed much of their strategic and practical operation myself, building on earlier theory, so I should be able to see how to defeat it. Other than that, I’m not sure. I never had much chance to think of skills I might have outside of those I needed to be a stormtrooper, and later to train others to do the same.”

Chewbacca lets out a moan and Rey giggles as the BB unit whistles a translation. “Chewie says that he could do with a hand fixing the Millennium Falcon. He says everyone else other than him needs a ladder and that just slows them down.” She rolls her eyes at the Wookiee. “I keep telling you, Chewie, there isn’t anything that Unkar Plutt did to that ship that I can’t undo. And I don’t need a ladder, I can climb on all sorts of things by myself. I used to scavenge Star Destroyers, remember?”

“I don’t know much about spaceship mechanics,” Phasma ventures, and Rey shrugs.

“Not a problem, we can teach you. As long as you can take orders as well as Finn says you can give them.” She flashes Phasma a sunny smile, and Phasma finds herself returning it, wondering at herself. She has read about the philosophical concept of ‘friendship’ but of course it was never relevant to her situation and so she is not certain, but she wonders whether this might be the beginnings of something that might qualify.

And so it is that, the following day, Phasma finds herself standing underneath one of the Millennium Falcon’s engines attempting to unscrew some unidentified part under Rey’s instruction, Chewbacca working a few metres away from them on some other bit of machinery. It has already occurred to her that this is a very effective method of keeping her out of the way of any of the Resistance’s secrets and still under the supervision of the only being on the base who could subdue her without breaking a sweat or needing to incapacitate her. No matter, she is resigned to the idea that she will have to prove her loyalty, and she is actually rather enjoying herself, although she has absolutely no idea what she is doing and the screws she is trying to undo are refusing to come undone.

“It doesn’t want to,” she explains to Rey, taking a small pleasure in the idea of an inanimate piece of metal having a will of its own and a sense of what it does and does not want to do; not so dissimilar to herself, not all that long ago, after all.

Rey gives an exasperated little sigh. “I’m not surprised, Plutt wasn’t exactly a great mechanic, he bodged most of the work he did, and his goons weren’t much different. Can you give me a lift up there so I can take a look? I can usually undo what he’s done, it just takes a bit of persuasion.”

Phasma blinks, and finds herself crouching down so that Rey can climb onto her shoulders. The girl weighs next to nothing, and Phasma straightens up with hardly any effort, thinking that her old armour weighed more than this. 

“I take it you can’t levitate yourself yet, then,” she ventures, trying for humour, and is gratified when Rey laughs.

“Master Luke won’t even teach me yet. He says I have to master all manner of other things first. Not least being able to levitate that silly practice sphere for more than a few seconds. I think he’s worried I’d break something.” She snorts. “I’ve abseiled down the inside of a _Star Destroyer_ more times than I can count, I’m not about to break something just levitating myself. I’m careful.” There’s a loud click and then a thump, and Phasma feels the movement as Rey smacks the offending part with her wrench. “Come on, you utter _bastard_ , give over! You’d think that vile old arsehole would have stopped making my life difficult once I left Jakku and got away from him, but oh no, he has to keep on and on and on. I mean, it’s not like the Falcon’s a masterpiece of engineering, but what he did to it is still a bloody travesty.”

Chewbacca howls and Rey yells back, “You know it’s true, Chewie, she’s always been a piece of junk. She’s just _your_ piece of junk and Unkar Plutt couldn’t mod a ship properly if he tried for the rest of his life.”

The Wookie moans again, and Rey just chuckles. “All right, _our_ piece of junk. You can’t honestly say that she’s anything else, but she’s got character. And that fat old bastard hurt her, and we owe it to her to undo everything he did.”

Phasma has next to no idea what the two of them are talking about (well, she has no idea what the Wookiee is saying, and only slightly more understanding of Rey’s words), but she finds that another of the philosophical concepts she read about when she was studying the history of the Rebellion might apply to her at this precise moment: the concept of ‘happiness’. Perhaps even also that of ‘contentment’. Rey is sitting on her shoulders cheerfully chattering away about the Millennium Falcon and insulting the mysterious Unkar Plutt, and Chewbacca howls in answer every now and then, and all Phasma has to do is to hold Rey steady on her shoulders. She has no responsibilities, and she has chosen to be here, to do this, to allow Rey to use her height as an advantage, her shoulders as a working platform. It is so different to her former life, the only life she has known, that it almost takes her breath away. So this is what it is like to be a real person, she thinks, and she is not sure where the thought has come from, but it is a fairly delicious one.

“You were a scavenger, then, on Jakku?” she ventures eventually, finding herself curious to know a little more about what Rey has been saying, a little more context to help her to understand.

“I was,” Rey replies, her voice rather muffled, and Phasma glances up to see that the girl has her wrench grasped between her teeth as she uses both her hands to jiggle the recalcitrant part from side to side, presumably in an attempt to loosen it. “I can dismantle any ship you like, and I can probably put it back together again better than it was before. I built a speeder from a pile of parts, and I restored a ship of my own that I found in the desert.”

“But you didn’t use it to leave?” Phasma queries; this much she has established: that Rey only left Jakku when Finn arrived and they stole the Millennium Falcon from this Unkar Plutt character in order to escape the stormtroopers and TIE fighters that were on their trail.

“I didn’t get the chance,” Rey says, a little more clearly this time, and Phasma glances up to see that she has removed the wrench from her mouth and is using it to undo a bolt. “It got stolen.” The tone of her voice indicates that she does not particularly relish talking about this particular subject, and Phasma is about to ask a question about her life as a scavenger, but Rey begins to speak again before Phasma can quite get the words together. “Anyway, I had to stay, or I thought I did. I was waiting for my family to come back for me. They left me there when I was little, or at least, _someone_ did. Left me with Unkar Plutt, as if _he_ was capable of bringing up a child safely.” She hawks and spits on the ground, and Phasma blinks, confused. 

“Who is this Unkar Plutt you keep talking about? I mean, I gather that he’s no friend of yours, but beyond that - “

Rey makes a strange, guttural noise that even Phasma, with her limited experience of unfettered human emotion, can identify as being an expression of disgust. “He’s the local big man on Jakku, or at least, he thinks he is. He runs the scavengers, he’s the only one paying for the things they bring in - there was some big battle there towards the end of the Empire, so there are crashed starships everywhere in the deserts - so he can name his own prices. He pays in food, and the only way to get food is scavenging - well, there’s other stuff too, but most people are scavenging because they’d rather do that than _that_.” She makes another disgusted noise. “I was left in Plutt’s care, but he never looked after me. He was only ever interested in what I could bring him. And I’m good at what I do, so he wasn’t too pleased to let me go. Plus, I think he was probably in the pay of the First Order, given how keen he was to get his fat slimy paws on BB-8.” Rey hawks and spits on the ground again, and Phasma is oddly fascinated by the coarseness of the gesture, and the depth of emotion that must lie behind it, motivating it. “I was afraid, when I left Jakku, that I was giving up any chance of my family ever finding me again, but…” she trails off for a moment, thinking, and then smacks the uncooperative part with the wrench again; it pops free and falls to the ground, narrowly missing both Rey and Phasma, and Phasma has to stop herself stepping back on reflex, reminding herself that she has someone on her shoulders who probably won’t appreciate having her head smacked on the underside of the Millennium Falcon because Phasma got startled by something dropping nearby. “Got you!” Rey crows in triumph, and wriggles around so that she can jump down from Phasma’s shoulders before Phasma even has a chance to offer to put her down. Rey bends down to grab the part and examines it with a keen eye and then throws it with uncanny accuracy into the bucket they’ve been using to hold all the items they don’t want to keep for use on the Falcon; they’ll be passed onto the pilots and mechanics in case they can be reused on any of the Resistance’s other craft.

“Anyway,” Rey says, straightening up and stretching. “I met someone who told me that maybe my family wasn’t coming back, and maybe I should be going to look for them instead. And maybe she was right. I still don’t know who or where they are, but…I don’t know, something tells me I might be in the right place here, to find out.”

Phasma nods; the idea of family is completely alien to her, although she knows she must have had one. It hasn’t occurred to her so far that she could search for her own people, the family from whom she was stolen as a tiny child, but, on thinking about it, that she isn’t entirely sure she actually wants to do so. She has surely changed into something that would be just as alien to them as the idea of them is to her. Perhaps she ought to be thinking more about finding a new family, or assembling one, finding new people to replace the family she never knew and the First Order that was mother and father and sisters and brothers to her for so long.

“Do you miss it at all? Jakku, I mean,” she asks Rey after a moment. “You sound like you enjoyed the scavenging, at least, and the building stuff.”

Rey shrugs. “The longer it’s been since I left, the less I miss it. I can tinker with spacecraft here, and it benefits something far greater than Unkar Plutt, plus it’s a lot less work. I don’t miss the sand, or the thirst, or Unkar bloody Plutt. I do kind of miss the climbing and the abseiling and all that stuff, that was kind of fun. But I’ve found greater things since I left, you know? I’ve found the Resistance, and friends, and the Force.” She pauses, giving Phasma a considering look. “Of course I miss the only life I ever knew before this, but it’s possible to make a new life, a better one. You can do that too, Phasma.”

“It’s going to be hard work,” Phasma says, and Rey grins.

“Of course it is. Wouldn’t be worth it otherwise, would it?” she says, and Phasma has to grin back, because of course Rey is right. Hard work for uncertain rewards is wired into Phasma’s very being along her iron will and her diamond-hard determination, of course it is. She can do this, and maybe she can even do it well.

They stand for a moment, grinning at each other, and then Rey passes Phasma the wrench. “Come on, then. There’s approximately a zillion other Plutt-related bodges on this beautiful ship and I can see one right over there that you can undo with about two turns of the wrench.” She points upwards, and Phasma twists her head to see something clamped onto something else that looks like a pipe or a tube or something. “Well,” Rey says, “Turns, or maybe smacks, you look like you’ve got a pretty good smacking arm,” and she flashes Phasma another grin and what else can Phasma do but grin back and reach up to smack the thing Rey is indicating with the wrench? It doesn’t quite move, so she tries applying the wrench to it and turning it a bit, and she feels something give so she turns it again and it gives a little more, and then it’s rotating loosely on the pipe. 

“Smack it,” Rey says, “just be careful not to smash any of the stuff around it,” and Phasma carefully lines up her swing and brings the wrench up sharply to smash into the thing, cracking it wide open and sending half of it tumbling to the floor. She reaches up to disentangle the other half from the pipe and gives it a rueful look. 

“I don’t think anyone will be able to reuse this thing,” she says, “not now it’s smashed in two,” but Rey takes it from her with a gleeful little laugh.

“You’d be surprised. It can be stripped for parts - do you see those little wires? Everything is useful. Stick it in the bucket, we’ve got other parasites to remove.”

And Phasma can’t help laughing as she pitches the half in her hand into the bucket and then leans down to the ground to pick up the other half and slings that into the bucket too. She is being useful and it feels good - so much so that she doesn’t even mind that nobody trusts her yet. That was only to be expected, and she is grateful and mildly surprised not to be sitting in a holding cell right now, and all right, the very obvious allocation of minders rankles just the tiniest bit, but she understands it, and she expects it, and she respects them for it; if they had welcomed her with open arms, she suspects she would probably have despised their weakness. 

Still, as welcomes go, hers is not too shabby, she has to admit. Rey seems open, trusting, almost eager for friendship, despite her obvious background of distrust and everyone-for-herself. Chewbacca, though Phasma cannot understand the things he says, appears to have accepted her without question, and even Finn seems - well, he didn’t insist on her immediate removal from the base, and she can only see that as a good start. She is not naive enough to assume that a showdown between the two of them will not occur eventually, there is too much shared history for it not to come boiling to the surface at some point, but she will deal with that when it happens. Hopefully she will be able to convince him of her intentions; she knows that he does not share her opinions of the First Order as ridiculous and hilarious, and she understands why. Finn has seen and appreciated the horror of what it means to be a stormtrooper in a way that Phasma still does not; she still does not care for the ordinary people she has slaughtered, although maybe that will come, and she knows that if it does, it will be devastating. But she has not yet learned sympathy, and she knows she has a hard road ahead of her, and not only because she needs to gain the trust of the Resistance and prove her reliability. She needs to learn how to become a real, functioning human being, if she is to make her way in this galaxy as a truly self-determining individual, and she knows she has many and varied emotions and responses to learn. She flinches from it a little, knowing how hard it will be to learn to feel, but she knows, deep down inside her, that she more than deserves the pain those lessons will bring.

It is some time before she has more contact with Finn than brief encounters in corridors and the mess hall. He seems to be avoiding her and she decides that she must respect his wishes; it is the least she can do to begin to make amends for the trauma she clearly inflicted upon him in their shared former life. She does not seek him out, instead leaving him to come to her, if he wishes, although she suspects that he will eventually.

Phasma has no regrets for the way she treated her former stormtroopers, or indeed the way she lived her life until so recently. She knows that there is nothing that she could have done any earlier to change things, and that in the beginning she was just as much a victim of circumstance as Finn was, or any of the other troopers she trained. It is true that not all of them took to those circumstances with as much gusto and determination as she did, but then again, most of those who were less enthusiastic did not last long. Survival of the fittest, one might call it, and does it matter what she believed, does it matter that she was among the First Order’s most faithful servants, as long as she survived to escape and tell the tale? More important for her is that she saw the light, as it were, and she chose another path; she made the first truly conscious decision of her life. Besides, she gave her stormtroopers the tools with which to ensure their own survival, in the First Order’s terrible machinery that had no time for softness, for empathy or compassion or individual thought. She trained them to be sharp and fast and hard, to follow orders so closely and instinctively that they never had any need to think for themselves. 

She is sitting on the roof of the administration block one afternoon, in the garden that has been hastily cobbled together from a few stunted trees in makeshift pots, on one of the benches made of junk and broken spacecraft parts scattered around, her legs stretched out in front of her as she eats the portion of lunch that had been doled out to her in the canteen. Chewbacca, still her ever-present bodyguard, had suggested that they eat on the roof as it was such a beautiful day - well, Phasma is no closer to learning to understand his speech, but she interpreted his soft moan and his gesture towards the ceiling as such - and they had headed outside. The Wookiee is sitting on the next bench with a couple of the mechanics, but Phasma felt the need for a moment of solitude, and when she sat a little apart from them, he made no protest, and so she assumes that she has won a small amount of trust. She is staring out over the base, her eyes very slightly unfocussed, not really seeing the buildings and spacecraft scattered below her, and not really thinking of anything much either.

“So you haven’t sold us all out yet, then,” comes a voice from nearby, and she almost jumps in surprise as she comes back to herself and realises that Finn is standing a couple of metres away, having carefully placed himself just out of her reach.

“Not yet,” she says after a moment, as calmly as she can manage given that he just startled her almost out of her skin, although given that she has spent almost all of her life so far projecting an almost inhuman serenity, she is fairly sure that Finn has no idea that her heart is pounding in her chest. “Not ever, with a bit of luck. As long as our mutual spoiled teenager does not get hold of me, at any rate.”

Finn’s mouth twists a little, as if he is trying not to laugh. “You’d better not call him that in front of the General,” he says. “After all is said and done, he’s still her son.”

“I know,” says Phasma. “I imagine it isn’t her fault that he turned out the way he did; she seems like a most capable woman.” Phasma has not seen much of General Organa since her arrival at the Resistance base, only a few fleeting glimpses in the distance, but she is already beginning to develop a healthy respect for the woman.

Finn shrugs. “I don’t know. Nobody feels much like talking about it, especially after…well. After what he did on Starkiller Base.”

“Mmm. I suppose that should not come as a surprise. Although who knows, family dynamics are a mystery to me.” She attempts a self-deprecating smile, and is gratified when Finn smiles back, just a little, reluctantly, but it’s definitely a smile.

“Me too. I guess I’m learning, but to be honest there don’t seem to be many people here who really know what they are.”

“Really? I rather thought everyone here seemed very functional. Chaotic, but functional.” Not like a platoon of stormtroopers, she means, not regimented and controlled and organised, but she doesn’t say it; she doesn’t need to.

“Yeah, it works, but it works because we all chose each other. Seems like there’s hardly anyone still has a family to call their own.”

“Well, I suppose being a member of a secret rebel militia probably isn’t conducive to a harmonious family life,” Phasma says, and Finn’s lips twist in that half-smile again.

“Maybe not. Can’t exactly go home for a quick visit, or send a comm to say hi.” He shrugs. “So how are you finding it here?”

Phasma has the feeling he’s asking to be polite rather than because he’s really interested, and she smiles faintly. “Interesting. Very different. I am enjoying the ability to determine my own actions. I am also enjoying the company of my bodyguard.” Her smile widens a little as she glances towards Chewbacca, who is deep in conversation with his companions. She might not be able to communicate with him in words, but she feels they are beginning to develop something of an understanding. “So perhaps my choices are limited, but they are still choices and they are still mine. I suppose the limitation is comforting. An infinite range of options would still be too much.”

“You won’t be given free run of the base just yet,” Finn says. “You have to prove yourself.”

“As you did,” Phasma observes. “In some style, if my memory serves me well.” She hopes he can hear the approval in her voice. He may have caused her own downfall, but at the same time, he showed that despite his empathy and his defection, he had retained the skills she had taught him. He was resourceful, ruthless and brave, and now that her perspective has changed, she realises that his behaviour had been worthy of praise.

Finn straightens up, almost unconsciously, and Phasma is amused to see that he hasn’t shaken off his conditioning quite as fully as he would like people to think. “You’re not my captain any more,” he says after a moment, his tone defensive, probably despite his best efforts.

“I know,” Phasma says, calmly, hoping to keep him from getting out of control.

“I don’t report to you any more. And I won’t. Not ever again. I report to the General.” 

“I know, Finn. I don’t expect you to report to me or treat me as your captain. I know things have changed. I don’t want to be your captain, or any captain at all.” She shrugs, turning her hands palm-outwards and hoping that the gesture reassures him, that and the use of his name. “I don’t want that title again, and I want no part of what it stood for. I want to live differently from now on.”

“How do you sleep at night?” Finn wants to know, in a sudden and sharp change of subject.

Phasma shrugs. “Soundly. Mostly. Sometimes I wake for a while, but mostly I sleep.”

“No nightmares? How, after everything you did?” His tone isn’t exactly hostile, more curious, and Phasma suspects that the nightmares he mentions are his own. She decides that it would be better not to mention it, however.

“Not one. Not yet, anyway. I still feel just as disconnected from what I did as I have always felt. I did the things I had to do because those were my orders, and I did not feel anything because I had not been given permission to do so.” She pauses, and then decides that she may as well be as honest as she can be; perhaps it will help Finn to see that she can be trusted. “I am still not entirely sure how to feel, let alone what I should be feeling.”

Finn shrugs, after a moment to think. “I don’t think I can help you there. You see, I always knew how to do that. You thought it was a failing, but I think I’ve learned by now that it was a strength.” He pauses. “You already know how to think about the good of others before yourself, you’ve been thinking of the good of the First Order before your own needs your whole life. I guess you just need to start thinking about the good of _real_ people before your own, you know? Vulnerable people. People like those villagers on Jakku, who never did anything wrong in their lives, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” His voice is shaking with emotion, and Phasma doesn’t know what to say to him, for it was she who gave the order to fire, wasn’t it? She was acting on Kylo Ren’s orders, but she was the one who told her troopers to activate their blasters and murder the innocent people standing before them. She still feels nothing for those people, and she does not quite understand how to feel differently about the things she did while she was under the thrall of the First Order. She believed that the First Order was right, and therefore it must follow that the things she did in its name were also right; now she knows that the First Order is ridiculous and she will never again do anything in its name, but to reconsider the things she did while she believed in its righteousness does not quite make sense to her. She did them because she believed in them; now that she believes in something different (what does she believe in now, truly? she does not know) she will do different things. A change of heart further down the line will make those things no less done. And so her realisation of the First Order’s inherent idiocy does not change anything about the things she did in its service. She does not understand the point of regretting things done in a former life, a life in which the First Order made sense. It no longer makes sense to her now, but that is because _she_ changed; the things she _did_ can never change, so what is the point in fretting about them?

The silence stretches out between them, and Phasma realises that Finn is expecting her to say something, although quite what he wants to hear is beyond her. She shrugs, unsure how to explain her thoughts, and Finn nods, collecting himself. 

“You haven’t really changed much, have you?” he says after a moment. “I guess you don’t know how to. You might find people round here don’t know how to trust you.”

Phasma shrugs again. “Whether or not they trust me is none of my concern. I did not come here to make friends.”

Finn gives her a look she can’t quite interpret. “So what did you come here for, then? You could have gone anywhere you wanted, but you came here, to the Resistance. What are you expecting to get out of it?”

Phasma pauses, thinking. The Resistance had seemed the only logical destination for her, and now she wonders whether it was the narrowness of her previous existence that had led her to think in terms of one-or-the-other, First Order or Resistance and nothing in between, nothing else. “The First Order’s very foundation is ridiculous,” she says slowly after a pause for thought that threatens to become far too long. “It makes no sense to allow it to continue.”

Finn snorts. “You sound like a droid. Logic and sense. I’m never gonna understand you.”

“I do not ask for anyone to understand me. I am here to serve a purpose, no more and no less.”

“Sounds like an empty kind of life. Sounds like the kind of life we had before.” Finn shrugs. “Up to you, if that’s all you want.” He shifts and makes to turn away, then turns back. “Don’t rule it out, though. Making friends, I mean. Turns out it makes pretty much everything more worthwhile.”

Finn walks away, and Phasma is left to finish her food and contemplate his words. They do not make much sense to her, but she has to admit to a tiny bit of curiosity as to whether he might in fact be right.

Phasma has been at the Resistance base for something approaching six standard months when the almost-deafening clangour of alarm bells startles everyone away from their allotted tasks. Phasma and Chewbacca have been carrying out maintenance work on some of the buildings, blessed as they are with sufficient height and reach to make ladders unnecessary. They have just enough time to look at each other in puzzlement as to what can be happening when a small and very lowly maintenance technician skids around the corner, panting breathlessly. 

“It’s the First Order,” the girl announces, “the General wants you, both of you. Main command hub. Now!” And she is off again, presumably looking for someone else deemed essential to repelling the attack.

Phasma frowns, what in the galaxy can the General want with _her_? But Chewbacca is already breaking into a run, slinging an urgent-sounding moan back over his shoulder in her direction, and she doesn’t need to understand him to follow his meaning, ‘come _on_!’. 

She follows in the Wookiee’s wake, letting him clear a path for her through the sudden throng of Resistance people all heading in different directions. Nobody is panicking, everyone looks as though they know what they are doing, as though each one of them has been given a job to do in the event of a First Order attack, and then drilled rigorously. Perhaps they have been practising while Phasma has been here, and she has simply not noticed.

They arrive in the command centre, skidding to a stop in front of the console, and the General looks up, nodding sharply when she realises who it is. She looks tired, Phasma notices, there is tension behind her eyes, and of course, she must be anticipating that Kylo Ren will be leading the First Order’s forces, anticipating the first meeting with her son since he murdered his father. Phasma wonders what that must feel like.

“You,” the General barks, snapping Phasma out of her wonderings. “You’ve led attacks like this. What are they doing?” She jabs a finger at the holoscreen, and Phasma frowns as she tries to interpret the antiquated display.

“We see a handful of TIE fighters,” Admiral Statura puts in, “but nothing else. Surely they are not attacking us with so few ships? Or do they have cloaking technology that we cannot see through?”

Phasma nods. “There will be troop transporters directly behind the TIE fighters, cloaked and deliberately arranged so that you will not detect them.” She examines the display again, casting her mind back to the many pre-mission briefings she attended in her former life. They always used the same formation, because nobody ever detected it, and nobody who might have worked it out ever survived. Surely it is not too much to hope that the First Order has not varied its methods of operation, still secure in its arrogance. 

Now that Statura has explained what the display is showing, Phasma finds she can see the TIEs, arranged in an irregular formation across the screen - irregular but familiar.

“They’re trying to distract your fighter pilots by sending the TIEs in here, and here,” she points at the display, “thus shielding the transporters, which will be here,” she points behind the TIEs, “here and here,” and on either side of the group of fighters. “They’ll be circling around the back of the compound to land here.” She points again.

“What do you suggest?” the General wants to know. 

“Split your fighters in two. Half to take out the TIEs and half to tackle the transports behind it, and deal with these two outliers using your ground cannon. What’s their range?”

“Enough, if they’re as close as you are indicating,” says Statura. “Direct the fighters to stay out of the trajectory of the ground cannon,” he calls to a young woman who is sitting at a console, wearing a headset and talking rapidly into a microphone. 

“You’re sure this is their plan?” the General asks, a frown drawing a deep crease between her brows. “This is something of a gamble.”

“I’m sure,” says Phasma. “They’ve been using this manoeuvre since before I began serving. I’ve ridden it myself more times than I can count.”

“And you’re sure about giving them up?” General Organa’s gaze is gimlet-hard, and Phasma knows that the General is also asking whether Phasma is deliberately feeding her false information.

She doesn’t hesitate for even a moment, thinking only of the objective, to prevent the First Order from reaching the Resistance base. “I’m certain, General. This is what it will take to keep them from overrunning the base. Fire your cannon. Send your fighters.”

The General nods. “You heard her,” she says, raising her voice so that everyone in the frantic control centre can hear her. “Train the cannon on these areas here and here, get Dameron and his hotshots onto the TIES, and do it _now_!”

Every one of them jumps to carry out her orders and Phasma stands back to watch the displays. Only a few moments later the ground shakes with the twin booms of the ground cannon being fired, and Phasma watches as the missiles streak across the holoscreen towards the blank blackness where she is sure the troop transporters will be. Once, twice, the outline of a ship blinks into existence as the cloaking is destroyed and then blinks out again as the missile explodes, taking the ship with it. Cheers erupt around the console, and the General nods at Phasma, a tight smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

“Good work,” she says. “Dameron, deal with those fighters, will you?”

“On it, General!” comes the fighter pilot’s voice over the commlink, and already the TIEs are blinking out of existence across the display, one by one by one; Phasma dimly wonders what sort of light show is going on outside. It must look spectacular from the roof where not so long ago she was eating her lunch and talking with Finn about her attitude to life after the First Order.

Only moments later, it seems, Dameron is on the commlink again, reporting that all the TIE fighters have been destroyed and asking whether the General wants him and his squadron to take out the still-cloaked transporter. 

“No, we’ll send another missile,” the General says, turning to Phasma. “You’re sure there’s just one more? Where is it?”

“I’m sure,” Phasma says, and her voice sounds very far away in her ears as she points to the display just above where the last TIE fighter vanished. “It will be here. No point wasting more than three transporter-loads of troopers on any one mission.”

“Good,” the General snaps, already calling out her orders to the fighter pilots to get out of the way and sweep for Kylo Ren’s ship, and to the cannon operators to take aim and fire. The last troop transporter blinks onto and off the display, and it is all over - well, all over except the possible presence of the self-styled Knight of Ren, but surely that hardly matters now? Everyone is cheering and hugging each other, but Phasma finds that she cannot hear them properly over the roaring in her ears. Belatedly she realises that she feels distinctly dizzy, and she casts around herself for a chair, lowering herself into the nearest one, recently vacated by a radar operator who is now leaping up and down with her comrades. 

Phasma does not notice that Chewbacca is beside her until he puts his huge, hairy paw on her shoulder and groans softly at her in the way that she has come to realise indicates concern, and a question. She opens her mouth to tell him that she is fine, but the words will not quite come out, and after a silence that is just a little too long, she finds herself shaking her head, and then shrugging, not ‘no’ but ‘I don’t know’. 

The Wookiee hunkers down next to her, his paw still on her shoulder, and belatedly Phasma realises that she is shivering, as though she is cold, although the temperature in the command centre is, if anything, slightly warmer than is comfortable. She does not understand why, perhaps she is ill, although she has never, to her knowledge, been ill in her life. Stormtroopers are chosen for their hardiness, after all. 

Stormtroopers. Like those in the transports that she just told the Resistance how to shoot down. Several hundred troopers, probably a good few of them trained by herself, back in her former life, wiped out in the blink of an eye, the blink of the pixels on the holoscreen. 

It had to be done. Phasma is well aware of that. If they had been allowed to land, they would have wrought havoc on the admittedly well-trained but still ragtag army of the Resistance. She knows and accepts the facts, and so she does not understand why the thought of their deaths is making her feel so queasy.

She is distracted by the sudden appearance of the General in front of her, and she pulls herself together, attempting to scramble to her feet before the General gives her a surprisingly sympathetic smile.

“No, don’t get up,” she says. “You’ve earned a moment or two. Dameron says there’s no sign of Ren. Either he was never there or he cut and ran at the first sign of trouble.” There is no emotion on her face at all as she speaks of her son, although Phasma thinks she detects a flash of something - anger? pain? frustration? - in the General’s dark, shadowed eyes. “Your information was invaluable in saving many lives today. Thank you.” The General doesn’t wait for Phasma to acknowledge her words before she’s turning away, marching off to deal with the aftermath of the attack, and Phasma is rather glad of it, for she doesn’t know what she should have done or said in response.

She tries to stand up, thinking that she should perhaps go and make herself useful, but a wave of nausea rushes over her and she sits down heavily again, biting back on the urge to be sick. Chewbacca moves his paw from her shoulder to her back, pushing gently between her shoulder blades until she realises that he means for her to lean forward and put her head between her knees. She obeys, muzzily, and after a moment realises that the Wookiee is breathing very steadily and deeply, in and out, and that he wants her to follow him, to do the same. It dawns on her that perhaps some deep breaths would help her to gain control of herself and so she copies his breathing pattern, in, out, in, out, slow and deep until the nausea fades away and she feels less as though she is going to disgrace herself in front of the entire command centre. 

After a while, she decides to risk sitting up straight again, and when she has accomplished that task without falling over or throwing up, she slowly and carefully rises to her feet. Chewbacca lets out his concerned-questioning moan again, then takes her arm and leads her out of the room, gently steering her along the corridors until they come to a door leading to the outside. Nobody notices them as they cross the tarmac outside the buildings housing the command centre, heading for a tall tree on the edge of the enclosure. Chewbacca points at the grass at the foot of the tree and makes a firm-sounding noise that, coupled with the weight of his paw on her shoulder again, she interprets to mean ‘sit down’. She obeys, leaning back against the tree trunk and stretching her legs out in front of her, and Chewbacca settles next to her with a sort of sighing noise.

They sit in silence for a long time, while the rest of the base gradually quietens around them. Phasma stares out into nothingness, looking at the sky above the rooftops but not really seeing it, not really thinking about what just happened up there, what she set in motion. She just lets her mind wander, thinking about nothing, shying away from the rushing, roaring void at the centre of her thoughts for fear it might suck her in and never release her.

Eventually the silence is disturbed by Finn and Rey, running up to them and standing panting before them. Rey is wearing a flight suit and Finn the uniform of the Resistance’s ground troops, and Phasma detachedly guesses that Rey has just seen combat but Finn, thanks to the efforts of the fighter pilots and the artillery crew, has not. 

“That was amazing!” Rey says, dropping onto the grass in front of them, “you knew exactly where they were, and they _were_ , they were right there! You saved everyone!”

Phasma raises an eyebrow; Rey’s jubilation does not sit well with her, somehow. “Did I? I rather thought that was your job. I only pointed the way; you and your comrades were the ones who pressed the triggers.” She cannot quite understand Rey’s excitement - well, that’s not quite true, she can understand the reasons for it, but she cannot understand the reasons for feeling it, especially at the moment when most of her brain is taken up by white noise.

“But we wouldn’t have known where they were! You knew, of course you knew, and you pointed the way, and…oh.” Rey falls silent, suddenly looking crestfallen, and Phasma can only assume that the girl has only just remembered who she is speaking to, only now recalled what Phasma used to be. At any other time she supposes she would be pleased, that she has apparently assimilated so well, shaken off the trappings of her former life, but now she cannot quite bring herself to feel anything. 

“It hits you kind of weird, the first time,” Finn says softly into the silence that follows, and Phasma wonders at the sympathy in his voice. “That you trained alongside those people, they were your whole world, the only family you knew. I took out a guy from my own team, that first time on Takodana. Didn’t hit me till later, but man, it hit me hard.”

Phasma doesn’t know what to say to that, but after a short pause, Finn continues, his voice still soft and resonating with remembered pain.

“You can’t think of them like that, once you’ve left them behind,” he says. “You can’t think of them like family, you’ll drive yourself insane. You have to think of them like these guys do,” he gestures around him at the base, “like faceless drones, not real people at all, even though you know that they are. You have to just think of them as the First Order, because that’s all they’re thinking of and you know it. You can’t save them, and they’re trying to kill us, so…” He trails off, shrugging, and Phasma still doesn’t know quite what to say. “You have to just…not think about it,” Finn says after a moment. “Block it out, pretend it’s not there. Whatever works. Otherwise you’ll eat yourself alive.”

“I don’t know how to,” Phasma hears herself saying. “All this time when I never thought for a moment about the people we were - dealing with,” her voice catches, for some reason she can’t say ‘killing’, “but now I…it doesn’t make sense.”

Chewbacca howls, and Rey nods, leaning forward to place one hand over Phasma’s, resting on her leg. “You cared about them. You still do. Of course you do.” She squeezes Phasma’s fingers, and Phasma finds it strangely, obscurely comforting. 

“How do I stop?” Phasma asks, her voice hoarse. 

“You don’t,” Finn replies. “You just learn to put it aside.” He lets out a small, hollow laugh. “You know, we were all terrified of you. We thought you hated us. It wasn’t till we took you prisoner on Starkiller Base that I realised you cared about us. You were proud of us, you were so sure your troopers would take us out, it never occurred to you to doubt them. You were mean because that was what it took to turn us into stormtroopers, but it was also what it took to keep us alive for as long as possible. You wanted us to stay alive, not just because Hux was judging you on how well we performed, but because you cared about us.”

Phasma blinks hard, her eyes suddenly prickling in an unfamiliar manner. Finn is right, she always cared about her troopers, her trainees and her cadets, and not just because of her own reputation. They were _hers_ , and although she had never allowed herself to feel it, she had cared deeply for them all. And now - now she has sent death to meet three transports full of them. She supposes she knew, academically, that this would end up being the price to pay for her new-found freedom, but it had never truly occurred to her that it might actually happen. If she stays with the Resistance, it will continue to happen, for the First Order will never give up until one side or the other is utterly destroyed; but then, nor will the Resistance, if the iron will of General Organa is anything to go by. So she must learn to deal with it, as Finn is advising her, or she must leave and find another kind of life for herself. 

Rey squeezes Phasma’s hand again, and leans in very carefully to wrap her arms around Phasma’s shoulders. Phasma stiffens in her embrace, she is not used to this although she has seen plenty of other people hugging each other since she arrived at the Resistance’s base. Rey does not let go, however, and gradually Phasma relaxes, especially when Chewbacca rests a paw on her back and Finn leans over to place one of his hands on her shoulder. She finds that she is shaking, but her friends - what a strange concept, that of having friends - her friends do not let her go until the shaking has subsided and the tension has completely left her. 

“It’s all right,” Rey murmurs. “We won’t let you drown in it. You’ll be all right.”

Phasma is not entirely convinced, but she finds that she is glad that they are there, and that they are prepared to accept her and to help her in her new life. So perhaps she will learn to deal with these strange new feelings, perhaps she will not leave. Perhaps there is a place here for her, and perhaps she will learn to pay the price for it.


End file.
